A Lick of Frost

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Andais had a lot of faults, I knew that, but she had loved her brother. He had loved her, too. It’s why he hadn’t killed her and taken the throne, even though he felt that he would have been a better ruler. If he had lived, and my cousin, Prince Cel, had tried to take the throne, my father might have killed Cel to keep him off the throne.

  Cel was insane, I think literally, and a sexual sadist who made Andais look mild. My father had feared the Unseelie Court at the hands of Cel. I feared it now. To save my life and the lives of those I loved, and to keep Cel off the throne, were the reasons I was still trying to be queen.

  But I wasn’t pregnant, and whoever got me pregnant would be king to my queen. I had realized only a day or so ago that I’d have given up everything to be with Frost and Doyle—including being queen—but for one thing: To keep these two men with me might require me to give up my birthright. And I was too much my father’s daughter to let Cel have our people. But the regret in me was growing.

  “Do you have a reply to the accusation, Princess Meredith?”

  “My aunt is not perfect, but she loved her brother. I believe that with all my heart. If she discovered who killed him, her wrath would be the stuff of nightmares. None of her guard would have dared such a thing.”

  “Are you sure of that, Princess?”

  “I think you might want to ask yourself, Mr. Cortez, Mr. Shelby, what King Taranis hopes to gain by this accusation. In fact, you might wonder what he might have gained from my father’s death.”

  “Are you accusing the king of your father’s murder?” Shelby asked.

  “No, I am simply saying that the Seelie Court has never been a friend of my father’s family. Whereas one of the queen’s guard killing my father would have earned them a death by torture. I think if King Taranis could have plausible deniability of the deed, he would reward his own guard for it.”

  “Why would he kill Prince Essus?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you believe he was behind the assassination?” Veducci asked. That fine mind was all there in those eyes.

  “I didn’t until now.”

  “What do you mean by that, Princess?” he asked.

  “I mean I can’t see what the king hopes to gain by the accusation against my guard. It makes no sense, and it makes me wonder what his true motives are here.”

  “He seeks to divide you from us,” Frost said.

  I looked at him, studying that handsome, arrogant face. I knew now that the cold arrogance was his mask when he was nervous. “Divide me from you how?”

  “If he could plant such an ugly doubt in your mind, would you ever trust us again?”

  I looked down at the table, at his pale hand on mine, my fingers against his skin. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “If you think about it,” Frost continued, “the rape accusation is also meant to make you doubt us.”

  I nodded. “Maybe, but to what purpose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Unless he has taken leave of his senses at last,” Doyle said, “he has a purpose to all of this. But I confess that I do not see what it could gain him. I do not like that we seem to be deep in a game and I do not know what we are playing.”

  Doyle stopped talking, and looked across the table at the lawyers. “Forgive us, please. We forgot where we were for a moment.”

  “Do you believe that this is all some sort of intercourt politics?” Veducci asked.

  “Yes,” Doyle said.

  Veducci looked at Frost. “Lieutenant Frost?”

  “I agree with my captain.”

  Last he looked at me. “Princess Meredith?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Veducci, whatever else we are doing, it is most certainly intercourt politics.”

  “His treatment of Ambassador Stevens makes me begin to wonder if we are being used here,” Veducci said.

  “Are you saying, Mr. Veducci,” Biggs said, “that you are beginning to doubt the validity of the charges made against my clients?”

  “If I find out that your clients did what they are accused of, I will do my best to punish them to the greatest extent that the law allows, but if these charges turn out to be false, and the king has tried to use the law to harm the innocent, I’ll do my best to remind the king that in this country no one is supposed to be above the law.” Veducci smiled again, but this time it wasn’t a happy smile. It was more predatory. That smile was enough; I knew who I feared the most on the other side of the table. Veducci wasn’t as ambitious as Shelby and Cortez, but he was better. He actually still believed in the law. He actually still believed that the innocent should be spared, and the guilty punished. You didn’t often see such pure faith in lawyers who had spent more than twenty years on the bar. They had to give up their belief in the law to survive as a lawyer. But somehow, Veducci had held on. He believed, and maybe, just maybe, he was beginning to believe us.

  CHAPTER 3

  WE HAD ADJOURNED TO A DIFFERENT ROOM. THE ROOM WAS smaller than the conference room, but then so were some single-family homes. There was a huge mirror on one wall, the glass of which held small imperfections, bubbles near one corner. The mirror had an almost smoky quality in a few spots. Its frame was gilt edged, and worn with age. It had belonged to the original Mr. Biggs’s great-grandmother. We were here, in Mr. Biggs’s inner sanctum, to make a phone call of sorts, though no phones would be involved.

  Galen, Rhys, and Abeloec had had their turn at the questioning in the conference room. They hadn’t been able to do much but deny the charges. Abe had stood there with his perfectly striped hair: black, shades of gray, white, all perfectly even and artificial like some artful modern Goth, but it wasn’t a good dye job; it was real. His pale skin and gray eyes matched the look. He looked odd in his charcoal-gray suit. No amount of tailoring could make it look like the clothes he would have chosen himself. He had been a party guy for centuries, and his clothes usually reflected that. Abe had no alibi because he’d been trying to crawl into a bottle with a drug chaser at the time of the accused attack. He’d been clean and sober only about two days. But the sidhe can’t truly be addicted to anything, just as they can’t truly drink or drug themselves into oblivion. It was an upside downside. The fey couldn’t get addicted, but they couldn’t use liquor, or drugs, to hide from their problems either. You could get us drunk, but only up to a point.

  Galen looked cool and boyishly elegant in his brown suit. They wouldn’t let him wear his signature green because it brought out the green undertones in his white skin. What they hadn’t seemed to understand was that brown made the green undertone darker still, and much more noticeable. His green curls were cut short, with only one thin braid to remind me that his hair had once fallen in a glorious sheet to his ankles. He had the best alibi of the three, because he’d been having sex with me when the alleged attack took place.

  Once I would have described Rhys as boyishly handsome, but not today. Today he seemed every inch the grown-up, all 5'6" of him. He was the only one of the guards with me today who was less than six feet. Rhys was still handsome, but he’d lost some boyish quality, or gained something else. A man who was more than a thousand years old, and had once been the god Cromm Cruach, couldn’t grow up, could he? If he’d been human, that’s what I would have said, that the events of the last few days had helped him grow up at last. But it seemed arrogant to think that my little adventures could affect a being who had once been worshipped as a god.

  His white hair curled over his shoulders and down the broad plane of his back. He was the shortest of my sidhe guards, but I knew that the body under the suit was the most muscled. He took his workouts very seriously. He wore an eye patch to cover the main scars from an injury he’d received centuries ago. The one eye he had left was lovely, three circles of blue-like lines of sky from different days of the year. His mouth was soft and rich, and one of the most pouting of the men, as if his lips begged to be kissed. I didn’t know what had wrought this new seriousness in him, but it gave him a new depth,
as if there was more to him than there had been only a few days ago.

  He was the only one of the three who had been outside the faerie mound, our sithen, when the attack was supposed to have happened. He had actually been attacked by Seelie warriors, and accused to his face of the crime. They had come out into the winter snow hunting my men with steel and cold iron, two of the only things that can truly injure a sidhe warrior. Most of the time even duels between the courts are fought with weapons that can’t bring true injury, true death, to us. It’s like one of those action movies where the men beat the hell out of each other but keep coming back for more. Steel and cold iron were killing weapons. That alone had been a breach of the peace between the two courts.

  The lawyers were arguing. “Lady Caitrin alleges that the attack took place on a day that my clients were actually in Los Angeles,” Biggs said. “My clients can’t have done something in Illinois when they were in California all day. On the day in question, one of the accused was working for the Gray Detective Agency and was in view of witnesses all day.”

  That would have been Rhys. He loved being detective for real. He loved undercover work, and had enough glamour to be even better at it than a human detective. Galen had enough glamour to do it, too, but he couldn’t play the part. Undercover, or decoy, work was only partly looking right. You also had to “feel” right to the person you were trying to catch. I’d done my share of decoy work in years past. Now, no one would allow me near the dangerous stuff.

  So how had Lady Caitrin’s attack taken place before we got to faerie? Time had started running differently in faerie again. Time had started running very differently in the Unseelie sithen around me. Doyle had said, “Time is running oddly in all of faerie for the first time in centuries, but it was running even more oddly around you, Meredith. Now that you have left, faerie time is running oddly, but no more oddly for one court than another.”

  It was both interesting and disturbing that time had run not exactly backward for me, but it had stretched out. It was January for us and the courts, but the date still wasn’t the same. The post-Yule ball that my uncle Taranis had been so insistent on me attending was finally safely past. We’d all decided it was too dangerous for me to attend. The accusation against my guards confirmed that Taranis was up to something, but what? Taranis had a plan, and whatever it was, it would be dangerous to everyone but him.

  “King Taranis has explained that time runs differently in faerie than it does in the real world,” Shelby said.

  I knew that Taranis hadn’t said “the real world,” because to him the Seelie Court was the real world.

  “May I ask your clients a question?” Veducci asked. He’d stayed out of the squabbling. In fact, this was one of the first times he’d spoken since we had changed rooms. It made me nervous.

  “You can ask it,” Biggs said, “but I’ll decide if they answer it.”

  Veducci gave a nod, and pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning. He smiled at us all. Only a hardness to his eyes let me know that the smile was a lie. “Sergeant Rhys, were you in the lands of faerie on the date that Lady Caitrin accuses you of attacking her?”

  “Of allegedly attacking her,” Biggs said.

  Veducci nodded at him. “Were you in the lands of faerie on the date that Lady Caitrin alleges this attack took place?”

  It was nicely worded. Worded so that it was hard to dance around the truth without actually lying.

  Rhys smiled at him, and I got a glimpse of that less serious side he’d shown me most of my life. “I was in the lands of faerie when the alleged attack took place.”

  Veducci asked the same question of Galen. Galen looked more uncomfortable than Rhys had, but he answered, “Yes, I was.”

  Abeloec’s answer was simply “Yes.”

  Farmer whispered to Biggs, and asked the next round of questions. “Sergeant Rhys, were you here in Los Angeles on the date of the alleged attack?”

  The question proved that our lawyers still didn’t quite understand the quandary of time in faerie.

  “No, I was not.”

  Biggs frowned. “But you were, all day. We have many witnesses.”

  Rhys smiled at him. “But the day in Los Angeles was not the identical day as the day that Lady Caitrin accused us of this alleged attack.”

  “It is the same date,” Biggs insisted.

  “Yes,” Rhys said patiently, “but just because it’s the same date doesn’t mean it’s the same day.”

  Veducci was the only one smiling. Everyone else looked like they were thinking too hard, or were wondering if Rhys was crazy.

  “Can you clarify that?” Veducci asked, still looking pleased.

  “This isn’t like a science-fiction story, where we have traveled back in time to redo the same day,” Rhys said. “We aren’t truly in two places at once. For us, Mr. Veducci, this day is truly a new day. Our dopplegangers are not in faerie reliving this day. That day in faerie is past. This day here in Los Angeles is a new day. It happens to have the same date, so outside of faerie it appears to be the same day, repeated.”

  “So you could have been in faerie on the day she was attacked?” Veducci asked.

  Rhys smiled at him, almost tsking. “On the day she was allegedly attacked, yes.”

  “This will be a nightmare for a jury,” Nelson said.

  “Wait until we get done demanding a jury of their peers,” Farmer said, smiling almost happily.

  Nelson paled under her tasteful makeup. “A jury of their peers?” she repeated softly.

  “Could a human juror truly understand being in two places on the same date?” Farmer asked.

  The lawyers looked at each other. Only Veducci didn’t share in the confusion. I think he’d already thought of all of this. Technically, his job description made him less powerful than Shelby or Cortez, but he could help them hurt us. Of everyone on the opposing side, Veducci was the one I wanted to win over the most.

  “We’re here today to try to avoid this going to a jury,” Biggs said.

  “If they attacked this woman, then at the very least,” Shelby said, “they must be confined to faerie.”

  “You would have to prove their guilt before you could get a judge to mete out a punishment,” Farmer said.

  “Which leads us back to the fact that none of us really want this to go to court.” Veducci’s quiet voice fell into the room like a stone thrown into a flock of birds. The other lawyers’ thoughts seemed to scatter like those birds, flying up in confusion.

  “Don’t be giving our case away before we’ve even begun,” Cortez said, not sounding happy with his colleague.

  “This isn’t a case, Cortez, this is a disaster we’re trying to avert,” Veducci said.

  “A disaster for whom, them?” Cortez said, pointing at us.

  “For all of faerie, potentially,” Veducci said. “Have you read your history about the last great human–faerie war in Europe?”

  “Not recently,” Cortez said.

  Veducci looked around at the other lawyers. “Am I the only one here who read up on this?”

  Grover raised his hand. “I did.”

  Veducci smiled at him as if he were his favorite person in the world. “Tell these intelligent people how the last great war started.”

  “It began as a dispute between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts.”

  “Exactly,” Veducci said. “And then spilled over all the British Isles and part of the continent of Europe.”

  “Are you saying that if we don’t mediate these charges, the courts will go to war?” Nelson said.

  “There are only two things that Thomas Jefferson and his cabinet made unforgivable offenses for the fey on American soil,” Veducci said. “They are never again to allow themselves to be worshipped as deities, and they are never to have a war between the two courts. If either of those things happen, they will be kicked out of this, the last country on earth that would have them.”

  “We know all this,” Shelby said.

&
nbsp; “But have you considered why Jefferson made those two rules, especially the one about war?”

  “Because it would be damaging to our country,” Shelby said.

  Veducci shook his head. “There is still a crater on the European continent almost as wide as the widest part of the Grand Canyon. That hole is what is left of where the last battle of the war was fought. Think about if that happened in the center of this country, in the middle of our most productive farming country.”

  They looked at each other. They hadn’t thought about it. To Shelby and Cortez it had been a high-profile case. A chance to make new law involving the fey. Everyone had taken the short view, except Veducci, and maybe Grover.

  “What do you propose we do?” Shelby asked. “Just let them get away with it?”

  “No, not if they are guilty, but I want everyone in this room to understand what might be at stake, that’s all,” Veducci said.

  “You sound like you’re on the side of the princess,” Cortez said. “The princess didn’t give a United States ambassador a bespelled watch so he would favor her.”

  “How do we know the princess didn’t do it, to trick us?” Shelby said. He sounded like he even believed it.

  Veducci turned to me. “Princess Meredith, did you give Ambassador Stevens any object magical or mundane that would sway his opinion of you and your court in your favor?”

  I smiled. “No, I did not.”

  “They really can’t lie, if you ask the questions right,” Veducci said. “Then how did Lady Caitrin accuse these men by name and description? She seemed genuinely traumatized.”

  “That is a problem,” Veducci admitted. “The lady in question would have to be lying, an outright lie, because I asked the questions right, and she was unshakable.” He looked at us, at me. “Do you understand what that means, Princess?”